Dopamine Fasts, Cruise Ship Investing, and Elon Musk vs. Jeff Bezos Feuds with Andrew Wilkinson, Co-Founder of Tiny
Cause I was like, pipe that content into my ears, baby, while I'm falling asleep. Like, I don't want to, I don't even want to fall asleep. I want to be entertained and pass out. I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to.
I put my all in it like no days off on the road.
Let's travel.
Never looking back. Andrew, what's going on?
Yeah. Too much. How are you guys doing? Long time no see.
Yeah, man. You went off the, you went off the deep end.
I disappeared. I became a monk, pulled a Matthew McConaughey.
Did Matthew McConaughey do that?
It was awesome. Yeah, apparently Matthew McConaughey, when he wanted to write his book, he drove into the desert, like 4 hours into the desert, and he lit— he literally lived in a shack for 2 months and wrote his book.
Did you read it? I read that book, or I read part of it. Um, if you read it and you use Matthew McConaughey's voice while you're reading it, it's actually pretty entertaining cuz it's good stories, but also it's like just stories about his life that like, I'm not sure I care that much about Matthew McConaughey's life.
I don't know.
I'm not smart enough to think when it already exists.
That would've been way better.
Yeah. Just honestly didn't think about it. It sounds like a good idea. I should probably do that.
Andrew, basically, we'll do the intro now. Andrew is a great friend of ours, has this big business called Tiny, where they own a bunch of different businesses north of $100 million-ish or so in revenue, took a company public. You're whatever, you're successful in terms of career and traditional sense of successful. You're a good friend. You normally come on a lot, but you just tweeted how you kind of took off for all of August and you kind of bailed because you were kind of having a a meltdown in which we all have had before, like a digital overload meltdown. And you just bailed, right?
Totally. It was really— it was bad. I mean, it's interesting to think about, like, I think this happened to everyone over COVID, like their life just shifted in a weird way. And my life just became crappy over COVID, which is weird because I had this amazing year. Like, we took a business public, we raised a big fund, we got to work with all these interesting people. We bought some great businesses. I didn't die of COVID All these great things happened. And yet, I was totally miserable. And when I look at it, when I kind of zoom out, my old day, I don't know if you guys know, but I live in Victoria, Canada, and I didn't even have an office. So, I actually liked just working out of cafes. I would just go to the same cafe every day and I'd sit there with headphones on. 3 or 4 of my friends would always work there. So, it was kind of like Cheers. There's always interesting people to talk to. My day was just broken up into a bunch of chunks. So, any given day, I wouldn't really be on the computer or in one place for more than an hour or two. And my day went from that to sitting in a house on my computer all day on Zoom and doing email. And it just kind of made me miserable. And so, when I look at what I love about business, I don't actually love doing business is great, doing strategy, coming up with ideas, all that kind of stuff. But the cool thing about business is you get to meet interesting people. Business is just a hack, right? So, if you're interested in health, you figure out a health business, you suddenly can meet all the most interesting people in that world. And I'm an extrovert. So, anyway, I was totally bummed and I started going on Twitter a lot because I was craving socializing. And I went from like 20,000 followers to 170,000 followers. So, I got totally hooked into that. And like a good day would be like I have a viral tweet or I go on your podcast or something exciting happens. A bad day would be I say something on Twitter, I get dunked on, I got misunderstood, or it doesn't do well. Like what a ridiculous thing. Like I'd tweet and it would only get like 50 likes instead of 5,000 likes and it would like throw my day off. So, I got to a point where I was just like, "Jesus Christ, this is totally ridiculous. I'm thinking about Twitter constantly. I'm checking Twitter constantly. And on top of that, email, checking stats, stocks." If I went to the bathroom without my phone, I'd feel like I was going to freak out. Constantly listening to audiobooks, constantly listening to podcasts, no silence. So, I just hit this weird— breaking point August 1st where I woke up and I was like, I'm not stoked to get out of bed. I'm not depressed. Objectively, everything is fine. I'm like, I'm just like, I have like anhedonia. Like I'm just not excited about anything. So I just said, fuck it. I'm just going to—
What's that word you just said? That was a good one.
Anhedonia. It means like an inability to feel pleasure, right? Like nothing, nothing would get me pumped. Nothing would give me a hit. Like, you know, you know, when you like, you're always, you go on Netflix, you're like scrolling endlessly for the perfect thing. You just can't find it. That's how my life felt. And so I basically, you know, it was the middle of August. I live in British Columbia. It's super beautiful. And so I just said to my wife, you know what, I'm out for the next month. Let's just go off to our cabin. We'll, you know, we'll go on some trips and I'm just gonna totally check out. And I set a couple of rules for myself. I was like, no phone, no email, no computer, no podcasts, no phone calls, no social media, no news. I couldn't even read nonfiction business books. So, it was pretty extreme. And I put on my Apple Watch, which has cellular. So, I was like, "Okay, if there's an emergency, I can get a phone call." And I put my phone in a drawer and I just disappeared. I went up to my cabin. And hung out with my kids. And honestly, for the first 3 or 4 days, it felt like there was a bug in my brain. I was just so— like something, an itch I couldn't scratch, just so irritable. I was being a huge asshole. I was slapping my pocket every 5 seconds to check stuff. Same. I'd be sitting on the beach with my kids and I'd constantly be like, "Oh, I need to text this to a friend. I gotta take a photo of this." So it was really weird, horrible withdrawal. But then after like 3 or 4 days, I was like, holy crap, like this is really interesting. I started reading fiction books and just sitting for hours, uh, you know, enjoying a sunset, taking a silent drive, doing all this stuff. And I think it's kind of like if you eat junk food all the time, like you're drinking Coke and having burgers and stuff all the time, and then you eat broccoli, it doesn't taste that good. Your brain is primed for these extreme flavors. And then if you switch to broccoli, you don't eat those things for a month, then you eat broccoli. Broccoli is orgasmic. It's amazing. And so anyway, I did this for 4 weeks and I was feeling really good and I came back to life. I reintroduced myself into society and started going out and working and stuff. And it was really bizarre. I would listen to a song that was playing in a cafe and it'd be like the greatest song I've ever heard. I'd read some random article and it would be fascinating and I'd just be completely engaged with it. And then problems I had to solve that would've pissed me off seemed like no problem and I was excited to solve them. And I was kind of going like, man, why? Why did that work? What was it about that? And at the same time, around then, I started listening to podcasts again, and I listened to this podcast by Andrew Huberman, Huberman Lab, which I'm sure you guys have listened to. He's amazing.
Yeah, he's coming on the podcast.
Oh, amazing. That's awesome. So, he did this deep dive on addiction, and he did it with this woman, Anna Lembke, who's a Stanford addiction doctor. And I was like, "Oh, this will be interesting. It'll be about heroin addiction or something and how they treat alcoholism." So let's start listening to it.
Those other people who have those other bad problems.
Yeah, I'm not one of them.
It's fun to read about them.
Totally. I was like, I was like, oh, this will be, you know, maybe philanthropic, you know, I can help fund the heroin addiction center in Victoria or something. So anyway, and as I listen, I just go like, oh my God, like, you know, this is not, this is universal. Like basically the chemical of dopamine, the neurotransmitter, is the thing that makes you feel craving and pleasure when you do things and it motivates you to do things. And I realized, you know, basically like she said, you know, something along the lines of if you eat chocolate cake once a month, it tastes amazing and you don't really crave it that much. You don't really think about it that much. It's very pleasurable. If you eat it once a week, you know, it's still enjoyable, but it's not as good. And you start having cravings, you start wanting chocolate cake. If you eat it every day, your brain literally craves it and you're in pain until you eat it. And when you eat it, it's not even that enjoyable. It just makes the pain go away for a little bit. And she compares that to like heroin addiction or anything. And so, you know, here we all are, we're stimulating ourselves with social media 24/7. We're constantly taking these hits. And the hits become less and less enjoyable. And she talked about, you know, she's at Stanford, so she's treating students, and she talks about these kids that would come in and they're addicted to social media and video games and they have no motivation. And so she said, look, I basically recommend a dopamine fast for 4 weeks. They can't do any of that stuff. They gotta go walk in silence, drive in silence, have quiet moments, not avoid those things.. And I realized that, you know, I'd basically done that for myself and that's why I felt better. And I, you know, I was an addict. It's crazy.
How do you propose doing this though, given like, I hear everything you're saying and I think, oh, I actually, I'm sure I have the exact same problem, but I'm like, I've got to record this podcast. I've got to text. I mean, I guess I don't have to, but you know, it's easy for you to say rich guy, right?
Like that, right? For somebody who's listening. Or even most people, I would say the practicality of detaching for 4 weeks is hard.
Oh yeah. And I think my version of it was extreme, but there's many different forms of it. I mean, it could be as simple as you just wear your Apple Watch and you don't text. And the only way you text is crappily on your Apple Watch. You take calls on your Apple Watch and you do Zooms on your laptop, but you just don't have that constant 24/7 iMessage coming in. Or maybe you just screen time your phone super aggressively. I mean, how do you not eat junk food all the time and have a good diet? Don't keep junk food in the house. Don't keep booze in the house, right? Self-bind yourself. So, I mean, I just basically screen time the hell out of my phone. And today, for example, I drove to my office. I just have my Apple Watch. I don't have my phone. So, I know if my kids fall down and hurt themselves, my wife can call me, but otherwise I'm not really texting.
Do you do that, Sean? Because I think of you, Sean, as someone who is connected a lot.
I am connected a lot. I've consciously picked two parts of my day where I'm like, these are my like disconnect days, you know, like these are my disconnect hours at least. Because, you know, I, I think about it very much the same as Andrea. I heard two things that, uh, that kind of shifted my view on this. So the first was Naval had this great thing he used to say where he goes, the ancient struggle was scarcity. You know, the ancient struggle was we just didn't have enough. We didn't have enough food. We didn't have enough water. We didn't have enough, you know, access to medicine, entertainment, whatever. And the modern struggle is abundance, which is we're overloaded with cheap dopamine. And like, and then that idea of cheap dopamine is something that literally last night I was listening to Huberman. A little clip that came up on my YouTube feed of Andrew Huberman. And it's funny by the way, cuz it's like, I literally, I have, it's like the addict is like learning about rehab while like shooting up basically. Cuz it was 3:00 AM. I had just, I was going to bed. I had stayed up way too late already. And I'm the type where, you know, if I get, like you said, I'm going to the bathroom and I don't have my phone with me, I'm like, oh, I'm gonna miss out on like my entertainment. Like I, Right now I could watch something, listen to something, do something while I'm just peeing or whatever, like brushing my teeth. And I had literally bought this headphone that I can wear to sleep cuz it's comfortable. So it's like a headband, it's like a soft headband that has small earbuds baked into it so you could sleep with headphones. Cuz I was like, pipe that content into my ears, baby, while I'm falling asleep. Like, I don't wanna, I don't even wanna fall asleep. I wanna be entertained and pass out. Like that's kind of the way I was sleeping. And so even last night I was doing that, my, my bad habit. And which is like, you know, ultra connected, too connected. And I started listening to this Huberman thing and he goes, he said something that really struck with me. He goes, he goes, one way to think about addiction is it's a progressive narrowing of what gives you pleasure. So it's a, it's a, you are narrowing the things in your life that, that will give you this rush of pleasure. So, so Andrew, when you, when you, when you dopamine fasted, you started getting pleasure from silence in the car, from the sunset, from fiction books. But before that, it's like Twitter was this cheap, fast, instantaneous, guaranteed source of pleasure. And so it was, it narrowed the number of places you were going to get that pleasure to like this most convenient time.
Over time, it also, it also became more painful though. More like when I first started doing Twitter, it was pure pleasure. So fun. And then over time, it took more and more of a hit to satisfy me.
The numbing, then yeah, you get numb to the, to sort of like you build up tolerance, right? Like you would with alcohol or anything else.
And of course you had to turn your, you turned your experience into a thread, which probably became one of your most reached things.
Of course it does.
Totally. Totally. Well, and this is the debate, right? Is do you want to engage? Like, okay. Like obviously it's a good thing that we can all use iMessage and use these devices. They're a bicycle for the mind. There's all these amazing things you can do. You can meet all these amazing people. But the question is how to use them in a responsible way. So like Twitter, I have a one-way Twitter client that I'm using. So I don't actually see the results of my tweets, right? Although in this case, I'll admit I did go and look. But my goal is to actually fully screen time on every device so I can't access Twitter, only the API.
I think there's— here's a good way to look at it. So have you guys heard of this person named Earl Nightingale. So basically, he probably died in the '60s, maybe he died in the '70s, and he was famous in the '50s and '60s, and he basically was almost like a Tony Robbins of that era, but he was a little bit more well-known as like a writer. He was like almost like a Dan Rather meets Tony Robbins mainstream famous guy, and he told this famous story on his radio broadcast where he talked to a farmer and he went to this farmer's house. And this is right when the telephone got popular. He went to this farmer's house and he's talking and they're just having this conversation and the phone starts ringing and the farmer doesn't flinch. He just keeps making eye contact and having the conversation. And about 5 minutes later, the phone rings again and does the same thing. He keeps making eye contact. And then a few minutes later, it rings one more time. And the guy's— the guest goes, Earl goes, hey, do you need to answer that? And the farmer goes, what, that thing? No, no, no. That's just there for my convenience. I answer that whenever I want. And whenever I heard that story a couple of years ago, I was like, "That's how I'm going to treat my phone. It is there for me." And so, I don't feel guilty about clicking ignore, deny, or not replying. This thing, this phone, it exists for my convenience, not the other way around. I own it.
Well, the other thing is, do you ever think about the 1950s? So, in the 1950s, if you're an executive at a business, you would, A, have a secretary, and the secretary would be keeping everyone away from you. And then you'd get your mail once or twice a day. And so you'd batch it. So you'd get 100 letters, half of them would be done by your secretary. You get 20 or 50 of them or whatever. And you just do that over an hour. You write all your letter responses, then you're done for the day. Whereas what we have is a mailman who's coming to the door every 5 minutes, knock, knock, knock, here throwing a bunch more letters in there and you're kind of doing it in the middle of everything. So, I think batching also is incredibly helpful. The other thing is people who talk about being friends with or family with an alcoholic, they talk about how the alcohol will actually— if someone gets in between them and the alcohol, they will always choose the alcohol. And I think the hard part is you think about I think about all the arguments I've had with my wife where if I don't get to follow my routine, my dopamine routine of, well, I like to listen to podcasts in the shower and then I like to do X and Y and Z and I've got my whole routine and process. If she would mess with it, like, hey, I need you to go and do this or whatever, I would rage. And I just thought I was an asshole or OCD or something. And then now being off of that, I'm not raging and getting frustrated in that same way. So it's really fascinating. All the addiction stuff just really flows through this.
I've created basically 3, uh, 2 windows in the day. So, uh, exercise is one. Exercise is beautiful because, uh, you know, I have a very low urge to check my phone when I'm working out anyways. So that becomes a full kind of like almost 90 minutes of Uh, I'm not looking at my phone and I don't care what's happening and I don't care who's— I don't care how much sales we have. I don't care, you know, who's mentioning me. I don't care who's emailing me, slacking me. Um, and so Sam, I think you probably have the same where when you work out, I don't think you are checking your phone, uh, during it.
Yeah, I don't, I, it, it means nothing to me. I do look at it to mark down what I'm doing. Uh, but typically what I've been doing lately is I'll mark down on a notepad with my workout and then I transfer it after the workout. Specifically so I don't touch my phone.
You guys listen to music while you work out? Because one of the things Huberman talks about is you don't want a dopamine stack. So people work out to experience pleasure and dopamine, but if you start stacking it— so you say, I, when I work out, I watch Game of Thrones and I get a smoothie after, and, and, and— you start to not enjoy the actual workout. Whereas if you do it for intrinsic reasons, you can actually train yourself to enjoy it, right?
I do listen to music because I listen to music too. And I like, I love the, like, that's, I feel like that's music listening time.
You know what I mean? I'm the opposite where basically I'm training myself to win your addiction.
You what, Sean? Sorry, go ahead.
That's funny. Andrew's saying I'm getting between you and your addiction. Sam raged out immediately. You know, the, I'm, I'm doing the opposite where like Dan Ariely, the kind of like famous behavioral economist, he was talking about this thing where he had this medicine he had to take cuz he has really bad burns. He had really bad facial burns and he had to take this one medicine all the time or apply this ointment and burn. It was like really uncomfortable. And so he was like, instead of trying to, uh, wrestle the brain and convince the brain through logic that this is a good thing for me when the brain is just saying, ew, this, I don't like the, the way this medicine makes me feel, don't take this. Um, he's like, I just attached a really, a thing I really loved, uh, to taking the medicine. So every time I take the medicine, I would take it during the intro of my favorite movie. And I would watch my favorite movie or my favorite show. And he is like, that helped me stick to my routine of taking the medicine, actually get healthier. And so for me, that's almost like working out where working out wasn't something I found super pleasurable. That's why I didn't work out for so long because it kind of felt like work. And so I had to retrain myself using music, having a, a great trainer who I like hanging out with, you know, like doing different types of workouts that are more sporty so that I would actually get pleasure from working out. So I would actually like it. So I stacked it intentionally. I stacked things I knew I loved onto working out so that I started to love working out because I only got to do those things when I worked out.
Yeah. And I, I'd also say though, Andrew, well, you're taking this stance, but I don't know if you actually feel that way. Is addiction necessarily bad? Like, all right, so I had, I've talked about this a month. I've had like alcohol problems and then I started like going to cigars. Like one of the way that I got off it is I started smoking and then like after smoking, I like started doing sugar or something like that. And I went to the doctor and she's like, I was like, you know, I'm eating so much sugar. And she's like, well, is it helping you not drink? I go, yeah. She goes, ah, fuck it, just do it. And I'm like, yeah, why wouldn't I just do that? And so some addiction, I'm, whenever I think of like, I'm like, just, it's not necessarily bad. Like, so like if you're addicted to one thing or the other, well, is that, is that like, does it kind of make you a little bit happy? You know, I think actually some addiction can be okay.
That's kind of, I think it's, it's, there's, there's a lot of different levels to it, right? Like I think obviously heroin, alcohol, drug abuse that leads to a life of guaranteed misery very quickly and you die young and you're depressed and everything else. But the fundamental question is if you're addicted to work and it's making you depressed, then, you know, just cuz you're objectively achieving, what's the point of achieving if you're depressed? Right. So I think that's the way I would think about it.
Yeah. It's like, what's the highest order bit, right? If the highest order bit is that I'm feeling good on a daily basis, I'm, I enjoy my life. I feel, I feel good. Then cool. Whatever your system is, is serving you. But as soon as that spirals out and it, it might start that way, the same behavior might start feeling that way. And then all of a sudden it, it's, you stop feeling that. That's what kind of happened with you, Andrew, is like, let's say like at first you were getting this great pleasure and rush from connecting with people on Twitter and sharing your ideas and that's fun and you were helping people because people heard those ideas and took them for their own. And then like, you know, everything in excess sort of has the, the cons will sort of reveal themselves over time. Totally.
Well, another, the other thing that's interesting is like, I'm the kind of person where I'm always hacking everything, right? So I was like, okay, if I do the dishes, I've found a way to enjoy the dishes. So I'm stacking on, I've got my podcast, I've got my music, I get my treat after, you know, all those things. Recently, what I've been trying to do is just do the best job of doing the dishes I possibly can in silence. It's almost a meditative practice. What I've noticed is, again, the first couple of times I did it, I was raging. I was like, "This fucking sucks. I don't want to do the dishes. This is BS." Then, after a while of just silently doing the dishes, I started really enjoying it. Now, when my wife says, "Can you do the dishes?" I don't get irritable and I'm not expecting a treat and I'm doing it. 'cause it's intrinsically enjoyable feeling the hot water and washing the pan and doing a good job, which sounds ridiculous, but it's no different than gardening or any other thing that people like. It's just tuning your brain for it.
So can we talk about something that doesn't seem similar but kind of is, but basically Andrew, you bought this company AeroPress, which is actually like, in my opinion, probably one of the best companies that you could own if you are trying not to get addicted to, uh, fast twitch, uh, notifications, alerts, because it's been around forever. It, you, do you guys even sell anything? Do you even sell it online really other than Amazon?
A little bit only. I think it's like 3% of sales are online right now.
So like it's a pretty like low stress, like, cuz you haven't built anything new or AeroPress is, it's basically a, if you don't know what AeroPress is, it's a coffee maker that's been the same way since been around since the beginning. Is that right?
Yeah, it's been around since I think 2006. And it's like this— it looks like a PVC tube and you press down on it. You put some coffee in the bottom of it. You put some hot water and you press down and it makes like a concentrated coffee. And it's been around, yeah, for a long time. And it was started by the guy who made the Aerobie Frisbee. He's like a serial inventor. So, those like neon pink Frisbees from the '80s. Yeah, it's It's an amazing product.
Can you say what you bought it for?
And can you say how big it is? I mean, what can you say about it?
And was it for sale or this was one that you were like, "Let me see if they're willing to sell." So, I mean, basically the story is 4 or 5 years ago, I was making coffee.
I'd been using AeroPress for years. We had one at our office. Someone brought brought one in 10 years ago. I looked down at it and I was like, "Oh, man. I wonder who owns this?" So, I started Googling. I realized the founder still owned it. He's this 80-year-old serial inventor who lives in Palo Alto. So, I sent him an email. I looked up his email on Voilà Norbert. I said, "Hey, can I come to Palo Alto? Would you ever explore selling?" He said, "I don't know if I want to sell, but I'm happy to meet you." So, I flew down. Chris and I spent a whole day with him just talking about the business. And there's just so much to love about this business.
What was he like?
He was this really funny old guy. He reminded me a little bit of my grandpa. He had hearing aids. He just clearly loved inventing and coming up with ideas. And he started walking me through all the different inventions and ideas that he had and things he wanted to make.
Did he actually work there?
Yeah. So, he was really responsible for inventing the product. And then, he had a president who was running the day-to-day business. And so, it's such a crazy business. So, there's zero marketing. So, they spent absolutely nothing on marketing. It's sold in pretty much every single gourmet coffee shop in the world. You walk into anywhere, Blue Bottle, from down to like little independent ones, everyone sells it. Um, it's very, very, uh, like, um, it's like, it's a, a category owner, I would call it. Right. So if you think about like a commodity product, even like Kleenex or Band-Aid, right. It is the, it's, it's the category defining brand. Right. So no one searches like pneumatic tube coffee maker. They just search AeroPress. So, and it's literally written on grinders, right? So like one of the settings on the grinder is AeroPress. So basically, this is an opportunity for us to buy a category of like making coffee, a way of making coffee. And like people are fanatical. There's like World AeroPress Championships. Baristas get like tattoos of AeroPresses. Like it's totally nuts. So anyway, I spent 4 years trying to convince him to sell his business., and I literally emailed him every single month for 4 years. I'd call this the Dennis the Menace, just like I have an email reminder in Superhuman and I just kept asking. And then finally, uh, you know, over the last 6 months we negotiated a deal, um, and got it done. And the idea is very simple. I mean, this is an incredible product. Uh, it's really just about selling it in more places and they really just didn't have a D2C strategy. So we're basically coming in, we're gonna focus on D2C. And keep the business as it is otherwise and just scale that channel. So we're super excited about it.
What you just said reminded me when, uh, I think he said this on the podcast, so I think I could share it. When, uh, when Moiz Ali was selling Native, and Native at the time was just a, just a deodorant. Uh, that's all they sold, one, one, one, one product with a couple scents or flavors. And, um, and so it was like a, you know, here's this, this, um, paraben-free aluminum-free deodorant and he's going and he's selling. And like part of the sales pitch of like how to get more upside in the deal was, hey, right now we are doing so well with just deodorant. Imagine if we expand it or whatever. That's kind of like the, the high-level idea. But I thought the way he said it makes a big difference.
So like it was wonderful.
He, and this is like, I call this out because I, you know, when I teach this power writing course, it's, I live for these phrases, these, let's take the same information, let's say it two different ways and watch what happens. And so, you know, one is, oh, there's lots of room to expand into other product lines. Okay. Emotionally registers as a 1. And then the, the, uh, the way he said it when he was meeting with somebody, they were like, well, how big can this deodorant thing be? And like, you know, what's the upside here for us? He goes, he goes, um, do you know how to write the word native on other bottles? He's like, like, if could you write that on a shampoo bottle? Could you write that on a toothpaste bottle? And he's like, that's your upside. And, uh, it's like, you know, obviously kind of a funny asshole thing to say, but it really like hits home. And so when you, when I was hearing about the AeroPress thing, I, it reminded me of that, which is like, you know, do you know how to make a website? Because right now, if, if it's all, if it's all done, not through D2C, not done online, it's like, It doesn't take a genius to make this, like the genius thing was buying it, not making it better and bigger than it is today. And that's like your sweet spot, right? Is you're not looking to be a genius in growing it.
Yeah. There's this period where factories went from being steam powered to powered by electricity. Right. And you could basically go and you could buy a factory and convert it. There's a lot of money being made to be made in just electrification in factories or products or anything. And this is one of those things, right, where you find a business that's using a legacy sales process via retail, which we're going to keep. I mean, it's an amazing advertising mechanism and we love all the distributors and everything, but at the same time, it's like, hey, we can also sell this D2C. Awesome. And it's such a simple insight that we don't need to be geniuses. A, even if we don't do as great as we think, we'll still do fine. We'll have a great business. And if we do well, we're going to blow the doors off.
One more point on that, that you bought it for $70 million. What is the annual, roughly the annual marketing and advertising spend that has created this business that you bought for $70 million? Is it more or less than $1 million?
Exactly. So I mean, here's the other one, right?
If you include salaries, there's, there's a few people in the marketing, but let's call it, if you include salaries, maybe let's call it $150,000, $200,000.
Hold on. How many people work there?
Why do you have a marketing person if you're spending $20,000? Yeah. Why does there have to be a salary? Well, they do do—
what they do do is lots of like, I wouldn't even call it influencer, but like they do a lot of PR and outreach.
But the company, the company, this company, it's like, it's like fucking Carmex or something. It's like you made it one time and then like what? When I imagine a business like this, what do the people do every day? Like, do you have like, like, you know, roughly how many orders you get?
I used to be like, why do you have 25 people here? You write one email. And you're like, "Yeah, it just takes a lot of people to make this email great and have ads." Well, for us, it was redundancy.
You needed redundancy because it was a digital thing that people made every single day. I actually think you could run the whole business with 15 people or less. But with Aeropress, you probably could— Did you only need like 10 or 5 or how many people did you actually—
Yeah.
I think there's sub-10 employees.
Wow.
They're managing the distributors and making sure manufacturing is good and all that kind of stuff.
That's crazy. And so a 5 or 10-person company for $70 million. That's freaking awesome. That's so cool. Like, you know what Carmex is, Andrew? It's the, like, the ChapStick.
Oh, the lip balm.
Yeah. Yeah. This is, it's like, this is like one of those, you, I think you up here, you call it a cruise ship. This is one of those things where it just does, it just does the same thing. Like you guys didn't create anything new after the initial thing, right?
No, no, we haven't done anything.
Explain this cruise ship investing framework. What is this?
Well, okay, so I think, um, when I talk to any young person, and, you know, myself included, I really glorified startups, right? And I, I, I like to kind of turn these into like, um, analogies or whatever, just so they're easy to explain. And I was like, oh, you know, a, a startup is really like a speedboat, right? It's exhilarating, it can go anywhere, but at the end of the day, you know, you're driving over waves, you're getting your body destroyed, you're freezing cold, you might hit a rock, you might get drunk. You really have to be white-knuckling and pay attention. And you're constantly worried you're going to run out of gas, right? So, I was like, "Okay, so that's a startup." A cruise ship is slow and steady. It moves on a straight course. So, you can pretty much estimate where they're going. You can make an educated guess that you'll end up in Hawaii versus Antarctica based on where they're going and what their course is. You can get a comfortable sleep, lots of amenities. There are very low odds of failure. It's not dangerous at all. And best of all, you don't have to buy the whole boat. You just buy a ticket. I was saying a stock certificate, right? So essentially, just as a mental model, when I look at a business, I go, "Is this a speedboat or a cruise ship? Do I need to be white-knuckling this? And do I need an amazing captain? Or can I just go and board a cruise ship that's already doing really well?". And it's much more boring to ride a cruise ship. No one's gonna give you an award or write a book about you for having an amazing, uh, crossing of the Atlantic or whatever on a cruise ship, but it's very comfortable and enjoyable. Um, so I, I've just been using that example when I talk to young entrepreneurs.
There's a similar example to that. So this guy named Joel, uh, what's the, the guy who started, um, Joel on Software?
Um, that's the guy you're thinking of?
Yeah. Joel on Software. Joel on Software. What, what is it called? So, but what's the thing that everyone knows?
Um, uh, Trello, Stack Overflow.
Stack Overflow.
Yeah. So this guy, he's, he's amazing. So his name's Joel on Software. His blog, if you wanna read good writing, it's this guy, it's called joelonssoftware.com. It's amazing. And he's got this amazing blog post where he talks about different strategies and he basically calls it the Ben Jerry's or the Amazon. And so with Amazon, it's new competition or sorry, new technology. And there's very little competition at first. And you basically need to go balls to the wall, like a speedboat. You need to go as hard as you possibly can early on to grab as much market share. You're okay with losing a lot of money. And you got to go fast, otherwise, you're going to lose and it's a zero-sum game. Or there's Ben Jerry's where there's already a lot of ice cream competition. You can go to a bunch of different ice cream places throughout the week and it's no big deal. And if you do a good job, this could last for 50 or 100 years. And that's kind of like the different strategies, although I would say that the cruise ship analogy is probably even better.
Totally.
I wanted to ask you, uh, you said something about the cruise ship thing, which was like, you know, you don't get to be the hero because you didn't, you know, white-knuckle, uh, and like, um, survive the crazy storm and come out the other side, which is like, you know, the startup founder who pulls it off and disrupts the industry and blah, blah, blah. And you had a thing on here, which I think is more related to your Twitter stuff, but I think they're both the same. They're both, uh, they're both related., which is what's the perfect amount of notoriety? So what's the perfect amount of fame and, and to what extent do you, do you, um, do things in order to build your profile, build your, build your fame, right? So what are your kind of like most, what's your most up-to-date thoughts on that? Cuz I think you've done a good job, right? You do have a high profile. You have a higher profile than, I don't know, 99% of people who do what you do, which is private equity. Um, And, you know, so, so you've done a good job in that. And I think that's paid work dividends and it's probably had fun, you know, uh, ego dividends too, where you feel good about it. Um, but you know, there's downsides. So what do you, what do you think now? What do you think is the perfect amount of notoriety?
Well, this one I'm trying to figure out and I don't really know if I have the answer. And I think you guys have probably gone over, gone through this exact same thing as I have. I mean, I was sitting in a cafe, my, my wife was like, hey, you know, go take, "Go take a couple hours to yourself." And so, I went and I sat at a cafe and I was reading a book and a friend showed up. I started talking to him.
Your wife just said, "Go take a couple hours for yourself." The MVP of— What's going on? I need to tell my wife this is a thing.
This is because I haven't been irritable because I'm not an addict right now. So anyway, so I'm sitting there and chatting with my friend and I'm sharing personal stuff and talking about what's going on in my life. And maybe 20 minutes into our conversation, there's this guy who's sitting to our left and he goes, "Hey, I'm really sorry to interrupt, but I heard you on My First Million. I'm a big fan. I've got a business over in Vancouver." And that was so cool. I'm sure you guys have that too. Every once in a while, someone will stop you.
Is that a real story, by the way?
Yes, 100% real. That's awesome. I'll mention the guy. He runs a He runs the best gourmet coffee shop at UBC, which is a big university in Vancouver. Uh, it's called Bulldog Coffee. And I was like, wow, that's actually genius. You've basically got to capture, uh, you've captured a market. That's smart. But anyway, what was going through my head after that is, oh my God, what did I say? Like, you know, here's this person who heard everything I was saying. I don't think I said anything bad or, you know, overly personal, but there is this sense of like, oh, there's a loss of privacy. And not only that, but you have to be consistent. So if I go on this podcast and I say I'm about X and Y and Z, now every time I talk to someone, if I change my mind or I want to be kind of a chameleon and just be a different person or whatever, like they almost like call you out or whatever. So it's just, it's, it's very interesting. And some of the other downside is that I'm sure you guys have had is consistency and commitment bias, right? So one example is I talked about the, um, sugar-free bakery thing I was doing. And we ended up getting, uh, we weren't legally allowed to use a key ingredient in Canada until it's approved. So I was like, okay, I have to shut this down. But I didn't shut it down for like 2 months longer than I should have because I'd gone on here and made a public statement to everyone. Hey everyone, look, I'm doing this thing. And I felt ashamed. So it was like an illogical thing. Um, there's this great quote by Bill Murray. And it said, if you think you wanna be rich and famous, try being rich first and see if that covers it. And I think that that's really interesting. And I think like you wanna be respected in your world. You wanna be like in film, you'd wanna be like the Coen brothers, right? Where it's like no one knows what the Coen brothers look like, but if they're at the Academy Awards, they're like ballers and they can get the attention and do whatever they want. I think—
Do you know who Daft Punk is?
Yeah.
Oh dude, dude. I was like, they've got the best job because I mean, they don't even have to show up and they probably make $10 million each a year just off these concerts. Cuz the EDM or whatever the genre is, they've, they're huge concerts. I'm like, they didn't even have to show up. They could be anyone underneath that mask. They could be anyone.
Totally. I think it's super smart. And I don't, I don't know what, I mean, what do you guys think? What, Sam, you've shared some stories about being stopped in the street and stuff.
Yeah. I get, Sean, do you get stopped? I, I get stopped probably, uh, once or twice a week.
I don't think our audience is big in, uh, the, the suburbs of California. So, you know, my, my neighbors, like average age is like 70 probably or something. So I don't think these guys are listening. But what's cool is like my trainer, he came to me the other day and he's like, oh, I met these two guys in the gym. They're like 21, 22 years old. Uh, they, and they were telling me like, oh dude, you gotta listen to this podcast. It's like, we're, we're hooked on it. And they're like, we're getting so many ideas. We're gonna quit our job. We're gonna do this stuff. And, and they should, they were like, what's, he's like, what's the podcast? And it was like My First Million. He's like, bro, that's my buddy. Like, that's, that's why Trey, I'm going there right after this. And they're like, no way. And so it's more of these like secondhand stories that have either A happened to me or B, like kind of light me up a little bit. Like I mentioned my cousin's name on the last podcast cuz Jack, Jack who was on the podcast had invested in him. And, he's like, dude, he's like, I know you do a podcast or I know you mentioned me on the podcast cuz I'll just get, a bunch of messages being like, oh, somebody, you know, he shouted you out, or can we invest in your thing? He's like, it's amazing how much instant, like, kind of, um, you know, love I get if you just say my name or say our company's name on the pod. And those are cool moments.
Yeah. The serendipity, like I talked about this idea, Sam and I were riffing on like, um, you know, what business would you start if you could start anything today or just throwing out ideas. And one of them was D2C pregnancy health. So, how do you build a super baby using supplements and blood work and all that kind of stuff? And now, I'm in partnership with this woman named Katie Dewhurst, and we're working on this business together, and it's been super fun. And I never would've been able to do that. And I literally met the best possible person for that idea. I never would've been able to do that. So, it's like the pros are huge, but then the cons are those kind of odd things. Or for you guys, I would assume you're probably addicted to your podcast stats, right? Oh, where are we ranking on the iTunes charts?
No, our, our, well, our, well, I would say we do. I would, I'm more addicted to Twitter, I think.
Yeah.
So like, I, I was like, oh, I'm, I'm gonna be slick and turn off my notifications. But what I do is I search The Sam Parr, my Twitter handle, like I search that and then type in latest. So it's like I see my notifications. I'm like, what? Yeah. Like I'm like, so, uh, that kind of like, That's stupid.
I'm the same. Podcast is not, podcast is not designed to be addictive cuz you don't get these like viral spurts. Uh, it's slow and steady compounding with no immediate feedback. You don't get comments after every episode, like, and that makes it suck. And that, that's one of the bad things about that. But the good thing is it's very zen. And so like of all the things I've done, newsletter, Twitter, and I've like tried to be successful in them, tried to grow them, gotten some growth, gotten to success, gotten, made money off of them. And they all, I like fade out because I'm like, you know, I don't like what this does to me. You know, I, I think one of the most toxic things you can do is care too much what other people think of you. And it's fundamentally the loop of what social media is, is you post something and then other people react to your, either your photo, what I look like, what I sound like, or what I said or what I thought. Right. And so care, you know, I hate, tweeting something and then wanting to go check the mentions, check the reaction to it. Because fundamentally I'm putting all my awareness and attention to what do other people think about me?
And that's a horrible way to be. That doesn't have to be, that doesn't have to be bad. So let me give you an example. Andrew, you probably don't know this, but I'm a fitness influencer now. I've got 4,000. So I hear like I was, I kind of did it as a joke, but kind of not. So basically I— this— the year of 2021, I wanted to work really hard to get very, very, very fit. And I had hit a little bit of a plateau and I was joking with Sean, but I kind of wasn't joking. I was like, I'm just going to start posting on Instagram constantly and just be— I'm going to change my identity to become a fitness person. And I've been doing it lately and it's obviously it's not a big deal. Like no one actually watches, but it's made me not eat certain foods because I'm like, I said, I posted that I was going to hit this weight. And these people are like, it's not real, but in my head, these people are expecting me to do it. I have to come with the result so I can make, fill this, make this story complete and, you know, like be like the love of their lives and like get their attention. And is that unhealthy? Kinda, but I'm getting a great result.
Yeah.
Well, I think, um, we gotta talk about this book I read called Wanting. Have you guys heard of this book?
No.
Tell us about it.
Have you ever heard— so Peter Thiel talks about mimesis or mimetic desire. Have you guys heard about this concept?
Yeah, he talks about like René Girard or whatever.
René Girard.
I buy the books and I'm like, I can't fucking read this. It's so dense. Like, I know it's like a French poetry.
David Perel did a bunch of articles about it, and even then it's just too dense. It's too academic. I didn't get it. And finally, you know, one of my friends who's like super into Peter Thiel gave me this book Wanting, And it was kind of a revelation for me. So the idea is basically that you want the things that are modeled to you by other people. So, you know, you meet a friend at a bar, you want a beer, here there's a martini. Maybe you go, oh, maybe I do want a martini. Right? So that's, that's like the most generic example of like a meaningless thing. What about if your friend tells you he just raised a round from Sequoia Capital? You start asking yourself, why didn't I raise from Sequoia? Why does his startup have more employees than mine does? Why didn't I get that job title? He has a sailboat. Why don't I have a sailboat? Why don't I have a Rolex? He moves to Brooklyn. Why don't I live in Brooklyn? So, basically, when you surround yourself with peers, you start competing with them and you start wanting those things. And I see this in my own group of friends. When one of us buys a new car, within a year we've all bought a new car, right? There's these waves. Or the other thing you see is mirroring. So, let's say I buy a Tesla, my friend might say, I'm buying a classic Ford Mustang and I'm gonna constantly talk about how much I love the rumble of the engine or working on it, right? It's like this counter mirror. So, it's super interesting because you don't actually want these things. These are not real desires. These are modeled to you. And so in this book, they talk about thin desires. So these are like extrinsic things coming from the modeling of others, right? So wanting a Rolex because people, you know, that are your peers value Rolexes. And then there's thick desires, which are intrinsic. They come from inside of you. So you enjoy working in your garden. You don't need to tell anyone. You don't post about it. It's not part of your identity. You don't do it to impress anyone. It's just something you quietly enjoy. And so, I think the big thing is coming up with what are my thick desires? What are real versus what come from wanting to be like my heroes or my friends or whoever it is? Because if you're not careful at pruning this, you will become this. And if you spend too much time around people who want things that you don't actually want, you will still desire and achieve those things.
So, I love what you're saying. Keep going. So, you read this book and there's the question of what are your models? Who are your models? And what did you take away from this?
So, yeah, I mean, are you jealous of Jeff Bezos? No. Jeff Bezos is not someone that you compete with, right? Jeff Bezos is off in this celebrity world, right? Jay-Z, that's not someone you compete with, right? The people you compete with are people within your bubble.
Like, it could be each other, us three. Maybe there's other things that— there could be other things that people are more jealous.
I, I, I guarantee you anyone who's on Twitter, for example, anyone on Twitter in business, you know, you and the Morning Brew guys, like, it doesn't matter if you like them or anything, you're still in a memetic competition.
When I see Sam post as a fitness influencer, you bet your ass I work out harder that day.
Totally. Well, and exactly, he now values health, so that's, that's good. If you want to be healthy, hanging out with Sam will probably make you healthier over time, right? So that's a good thing. And there's so many different bubbles. There's so many different worlds. So, for example, if you live in San Francisco, the thing that everyone wants is fundraising and valuation or who your investors are. If you're in New York, it might be about your wealth, your art collection, or your fashion. In LA, it would be what awards have you won, where do you get restaurant reservations. Athletes, it's Olympic medals. Chefs, it's Michelin stars. Comedians, it's Netflix specials. You name it. So the way to figure out who your models are as well is actually to ask kind of an odd question. You say, "Who do I not want to succeed?" And maybe it's deep within you, but it might be that guy on Twitter who you're friendly with and everything's fine, but he kind of bothers you or he's maybe a little ahead of you, has maybe 10,000 more followers, and you just don't want him to succeed. That's probably who you're in mimetic rivalry with. And so, the real question is, how do you, A, align with people who will lead you down a path of this mimetic copying that will actually make you happy? So, that's spending time with people who are actually similar to you and want things that are your thick desires, being healthy, being safe, gardening, whatever that is. And then, the other question is, how do you opt out? And really, that's pruning. What do you read? Who do you listen to? Who do you spend time with? And for an example, I thought about for myself, I was spending all this time reading about Warren Buffett. I've idolized Warren Buffett forever. But when I think about what does Warren Buffett actually do in his day, he's a guy who can sit there and read all day, reading annual reports. That's what his life is set up for. I would kill myself. I have no interest in doing that. And I think I'd be very bored. So, I have to be very careful not to over-index on Warren Buffett. The other thing you can do is you can opt out. So, you can say, "I'm going to be like Dave Chappelle. I'm going to move to Ohio where I'm just a redneck in a small community or whatever." For me, I live in Victoria. I'm not as exposed to this as other people. And there's this great story of this guy who's a Michelin star chef. So, you think about chefs, the ultimate is you open a restaurant, a really high-end restaurant, you get a Michelin star. This guy, Sebastian Bras, did that. All he wanted was to get a Michelin star and he got it. And when he got it, it didn't actually make him happier. He just wanted a second star. Then he got a second star. Well, it didn't make him happy either. And he just lived in fear of losing it because they just come and inspect you. It'll be like, they'll come to your restaurant and if the tablecloth isn't perfectly clean or the food isn't a certain way, You know, you get rejected. And so, you end up living your life by these arbitrary rules that don't actually make you happy. And you fight for something that is not what you actually want. So, this guy is a baller. He just said, Michelin, I want you to remove my star. Take me out of the guide. I'm out. Right? So, you can do stuff like that, but that takes like brass balls. That's very difficult to do.
Why did you mention read? Why? I mean, you're talking about reading and everything, and I wanna ask you what you're reading. Why did you mention Readwise on your document?
Well, I think like, you know, I'm like you guys. I just read all sorts of random stuff and I'll read all these books that'll make a huge impact on me, but then I'll forget everything. Right. And so I use this tool called Readwise where my Kindle highlights basically get emailed to me once a day at random. And it's like, uh, there's like a memory, uh, thing called spaced repetition. And so it basically sends you, you know, every week, every month, I'll get all these ideas back, boomeranged back to me. And I just kind of am reminded of some of these things I've read.
When you're reading, do you just read book after book?
Yeah, usually.
What I do that as well. I'm thinking that's actually really stupid. If I find like a book that like has a big impact or is like, has a ton of learnings, I should probably reread that every handful of months or something like You, you know, you, you, you should do whatever it takes to really understand and, and grasp an assigned reading. Not as much like go from thing to thing to thing. You know what I mean?
You know, do you know what the Feynman method is? No. It's basically you, you read the thing and then you teach it and you can't truly understand it until you teach it. So like a, a way of remembering really well would be go on the podcast and in a very cogent way summarize what you've learned and then keep bringing it up for yourself. Right? Like, I mean, you know, just even writing out some notes for this podcast, it forced me to actually go, what did I learn in this book? And I'm sure it'll actually hammer it into my head better.
That's how I used to be in college. I didn't know that that was a technique, but I had figured out pretty early on that the way I could get better grades, like I wanted to have good grades, but I didn't want to keep studying as much. I felt like other people studied so much, they spent so many hours in the library and I I just didn't find it. I didn't want to do it. And I was like, well, here's what I'll do. I'll basically, uh, quickly skim the material and then I will lead a study group where I'll teach it to that group. And in that process, I was like a horrible teacher for the first like hour when I was doing it. Cause I don't know the material yet. I actually don't even understand it. I barely remember half of it, but I remember half of it. And like by teaching it, I remembered that half and I quickly figured out the other half I didn't know.. And I just remember like, that's how I studied for every final when I was in college. And it was, um, it was pretty amazing because I could study half the time as other people, because what they would do is they would try to just ingest it and just keep ingesting it. They would just try to keep reading it and rereading it and writing notes and rereading it. And they would never try to articulate it off the top of their head to anybody else or answer a question, you know, in public with anybody else. And so they never did that and they just tried to solidify it in their head, but it never really did for them, or it took way longer to do it.
It's such a hack, right, to be able to summarize it in one sentence or have a metaphor or whatever it is that helps you remember.
Can you do that just by writing a blog post about it, or do you actually have to speak about it?
Yeah, of course. No, you could do that.
I used to run this thing called the Anti-MBA, and it was a weekly book club. Basically, we would read a book a month and And each week we would divide that book into quarters. So we'd talk about a book every week and I would basically be leading this and we would have 10 or 20 people show up and I would lead it. And I remember I learned like crazy every book. I was like mastering it, but I wasn't sure if I could do that now just through blogging or if I actually had to like organize and talk to people about it. Cause that'd be a pain in the ass.
One thing I've seen is my, uh, uh, I don't know, this is kind of an unpopular way to think or something. I don't know. I don't think this is the, this is how most people think, but listen, like Andrew. So I think Andrew, I think you're super smart and amazing and great. And I love when you bring these ideas, cuz it makes me be like, it brings all these new thoughts into my head. But I think you, and I think Sam to an extent, do something that I used to do that I'm trying to stop doing. And that is like, this constant optimization. And so like, you know, this idea that I'm gonna read a book, I'm gonna find a great book. And then Sam's like, I'm gonna reread it cuz I want it to sink in. I'm gonna drill it into my head. And Andrew's like, no, what I do is I highlight using this tool and I set up an auto trigger to email me back the best highlights. Like old me would've been like, dope. Love that. That's gonna be my solution to this like underlying ever-present problem. And I'm gonna keep seeking these solutions that are like new hacks, new optimizations. New like kind of techniques and solutions and methods. And the one like realization I've had by talking to some other people outside of this, like my trainer is really the one who drilled this in me. 'Cause he would be talking to me during a workout. He would say something to me. I would go run to my notepad. I'd write it down because he said this really wise thing and it was so good. I wanted to like remember it as a nugget of gold. And he told me, he goes, he goes, you know, you won't have to write these down. And I go, I go, what do you mean?
And he's like, also, how nerdy of you to be writing this down when you're doing a workout?
I would literally stop a set and I would drop the weight and I would go write the thing down. Cause I'm like, you just said it so perfectly. And in my head I'm like, I'm gonna know this. I'm gonna remember this. I'm gonna tell other people. I'm gonna say this on the pod. It's gonna look great. Like my head actually is silently thinking all these other things. It's like trying to like achieve some stupid goal because I'm like, this is the answer. This is the nugget that's gonna be my next hit, my next tweet, my next whatever, that's gonna be great. So that's like, you know, a lame thing to admit, but that's true. That's where my brain was going. But I was like, what do you mean I'll have to write these down? Like, you know, I'll just remember it. And he's like, you won't feel like you lack something. And so you'll stop like trying to catch everything and grab everything and hold onto everything and learn the next new thing. And what you'll realize is like, you already know the answers. Uh, he's like, you know, it's like a thin book. You didn't like, imagine a book that ended in 20 pages and it's like, you know, for, for a diet book, right? You can keep searching for the next fad diet, you know, the Atkins diet and then the slow carb diet and then the carnivore diet. And you're, you're just cycling through all these different diets trying to find the next solution and read the next thing. And in reality, you kind of know the answer. The answer is, you know, don't eat too much. And eat, like, basically like eat real food, mostly plants and not too much. 3 lines. You, that is the answer. And, but instead of actually just let sitting in it, you want it to be more complicated than that. You would like it to be that actually there is more. I need to go learn and find and try and buy this, you know, get this app that's gonna do my intermittent fasting and then put this ketone drops in my drink and then wear a patch that measures my glucose monitor and like, All these optimizations. And so I've actually spent so much of my life trying these different optimizations and I've really, so I'm just saying this as almost like a public service announcement of like, if that's you, if you've done a bunch of these optimizations, you've kind of on this endless path of optimizing and you do get results. It's not that you don't get any results, but like I've now found this like other way that's a lot more peaceful and a lot more fun. And it's basically, um, get rid of the underlying, like, feeling of lack and doubt that you have that's causing you to constantly chase the next best method and solution and answer.
I think, I think that really resonates. And one of the things I didn't talk about was my routines and how that was making me miserable. I think often routines are great and best practices are great, but they end up creating conditions under which you can have a good day. And if you don't follow the conditions, your brain starts saying, oh, it's not a good day because I didn't get that workout in, or I didn't get— I didn't do my cold plunge and do my Tim Ferriss tea in the morning. I didn't do my Evernote journaling routine. I didn't do a gratitude journal. I didn't use this app, right? There's endless things. And I totally resonate with that. Like, one of the practices for me was like, how do I not check my Oura Ring? How do I not check my blood glucose? All these stupid things that are giving me— they're tickers, right?
Yeah.
Stock tickers. There you go. Like they're tickers for life and tickers make you miserable. Look at a stock ticker, look at KPIs, look at revenue day to day, hour to hour, and you're miserable. You shouldn't have those for your life.
Yeah. And I should say it's bad for business for me to say this because this podcast and all of my content and everything I put out is optimizations, hacks, shortcuts, ways to be better, ways to better yourself in this constant curiosity about what are some other things I could try to better myself? What are some other areas I want to be better? And what are some ways I could be better? And so I'm like juggling these two things that are almost complete, like opposition. And like, you know, and I, and I'm not perfect on it either, right? Like I still wake up, swipe over and check the Bitcoin price, even though I know it's this roller coaster. And like when it's red, I'm starting my day off with like a, you know, a tiny jab. And when it's green, I start my day off with this this, this great little delight that, like, I don't control. And so now my, my, my first mood is up to, you know, the conditions of, like, you know, fucking crypto prices, which is silly.
Totally. Sean, what do you think? What do you think people are going to think of an episode like this? I'll be, I'll be curious. I'll be— because I sometimes I get nervous about talking about this shit because I'm like, I don't want to pontificate too much. I don't want to, like, act like our way or my way or your way is necessarily better than any other way. I get nervous about having a guru productivity vibe. I get nervous. And then I also get nervous. I'm like, these people just want money-making schemes. Let's just give it to them. I'm very—
Think about Chamath, right? Why is Chamath interesting? He's interesting because he goes on CNBC, he talks about all this crazy investing stuff, and then he goes with Kara Swisher and he pours his heart out and he's interesting and empathic.
Well, yeah. And, and like, he doesn't give a fuck.
You do a, yeah, you do a disservice if you don't show the negative side of all this stuff at the same time, because people will just blindly think, you know, oh yeah, these guys have it all figured out. And we don't. We're all as miserable as anyone else.
I think two things of what you said. I think you're not giving the audience enough credit. Like, the people who really listen to this podcast, they, they know this is not money-making schemes. We just like, we are shooting the shit about business stuff and we're kind of business nerds and that's what they like. So it's not actually that they're looking for, oh God, I came to this to find my next million dollar idea. That's the like surface level thing. And then when you get, when you get through the door, you realize that's, that's not it. The second thing is it's just like, like this feeling you're having, like, what are people gonna think of this episode? I'm ridding myself of that, that question. Uh, that question doesn't come into my brain anymore. Why?
Because who cares? Really? Not at all.
I'm, I am actively— Sean's gonna be wearing red robes. He's gonna have his head shaved next.
Dude, he already does. He shows up to the podcast half the time wearing a robe.
Exactly. Uh, I'm not saying I have rid myself of it. I'm saying I am trying to rid myself of that, uh, of that question.
Right.
And the, it's coming up less and less. Why? Because two things. A, I don't wanna be that way. I don't wanna sit here and I be the dancing monkey performing on the stage just, just for their entertainment. I wanna be here for my entertainment. And, um, like, who are the people who are gonna love this podcast? The people who love what we talk about, period. So if we're talking about something we are interested in, then they're always gonna be into it. And if we just keep that as the method, right? Who are my customers? The people that love what I do. That becomes the sort of like the, the, the, the most joyful way to do, you know, any kind of business or any kind of, uh, product because it is just you pushed out. And so then you don't have to worry about what are they gonna want? Did they like me? Do they not like me? Is this good? Is this bad? You know, I liked it, but are they gonna think this? It's like those questions just disappear if you commit to, uh, who are my customers? The people that love what I do. So same thing for this. Who are the, who are our listeners? The people that like what we talk about, period. So then I don't need to wor— if, if I like what we talked about, then I don't need to worry about it. And that becomes a very simple filter that's internal and not like seeking kind of what, what, what are other people gonna think about this?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and you and I agree on a lot of stuff about how we feel about the audience. I guess sometimes I think of it like, I'm gonna do whatever the hell I want to do. And other times I do think I am here, I exist to serve like others, right? So like you could say like, well, just don't give a fuck. Don't give, don't care about what other people think. Yeah. I, but what if I phrased it of like, well, I'm, I'm here to service other people or you, you know what I mean? But it's like that's what I am. And that's a fine line.
Andrew's saying the service is being you, you know, that's the service. The service is being you in public, in public, transparently, you know.
Lately I've been watching all the Dave Chappelle standup comedy from Netflix. I just kind of like rediscovered him and watched them all. And if you watch the first one, it's kind of like a generic dirty standup, like his old ones, you mean, or yeah, his old ones from like 20, early 2017 or whatever. And then as you watch them, they get more and more introspective and darker and longer stories and different style. And it's cool to see someone evolve or see some deeper emotional range or whatever. So, I don't think it really matters. At the end of the day, yes, you guys, this podcast you do, I listen. I have to treat it like crack. When I listen to you guys, I get so fired up. I'm always in the shower and I'm going, "Fuck, why don't we do that business?" or "I should start this." You know, I love it, but, and that's, that's the, that's what people love about the podcast. But at the same time, like, yeah, I think talking about this stuff is fine. Like, I think it's interesting.
Look at a couple of the bigger podcasts that are kind of like people we like to listen to sometimes. So look at Rogan. Do you think Rogan gets on the pod every day and say, like, do you think he's thinking, all right, um, you know, what do the people want? Like, what does the audience want? How do I make this conversation entertaining for them? Like, I think that's so far back in his mind where it seems to be like he's just having a conversation with somebody he finds interesting and he talks about what's interesting to him in that thing.
But you know what, if Rogan came on and he said, I had a big fight with my wife this morning, and he started talking about that for 30 minutes and didn't let the guest talk. Yeah. He's broken the format. Yeah.
But, but also with Rogan, like you'll notice he, like, for example, um, he'll say stuff like, uh, he changes his words. He's like, well, I like. And I agree with this, he'll be like, well, you know, I'm not informed on that topic, so I don't even want to rant about it. Of course. Or he'll say like, you know, I like, I'll notice he'll use certain words to be respectful. And he's like, well, you know, and people have asked him, he's like, well, I just didn't know. And I know that I influence people, so I just want to keep in mind that I don't want to, you know, say something incorrect. And so that's keeping— so I don't think you have to entirely tell people that you don't give a fuck about their opinion.
I guess what I mean is like, Rogan's format where he's like, yeah, I'm gonna talk to an astrophysicist one day and then I'm gonna talk to an MMA meathead the next day. And then I'm gonna, uh, do a drinking podcast with my buddies while we watch some other shit that you don't get. You're not looking at, I'm just looking at it. I'm gonna talk out loud and I'm gonna do it for 3, I'm gonna do 3-hour-long episodes.
Yeah, dude. But Rogan's a fucking comedian. His whole shtick is that he gets in front of people and like comedians are inherently like the most neediest people. People. He gets on a stage and like it needs them to laugh and reply, and if he bombs, he feels bad.
I'm not saying he's perfect, but what I'm saying is his show broke a bunch of rules that other people would have had. Our episode should be 1 hour. You should have like this, you know, like this intro. You shouldn't one day be talking about one topic and then you're, you know, the people who want to hear Neil deGrasse Tyson don't care about Brendan Schaub or whatever else. Sure, sure, sure. And then you have like, like Lex Fridman, huge, huge podcast, huge channel he's created, and the guy's talking about the nerdiest of the nerdiest subjects in the most like monotone voice.
Right.
So it's like, he's not Mr. Charisma. He's not, uh, talking about, uh, pop culture and like other top, cuz he's not, he found the balance of doing what's interesting to him in his normal personality. Um, and I just think that's just like a better way to go than trying to— Yeah.
I, I'm just trying to say, don't act, don't act like Rogan's not human and has the same insecurities and like same, well, I wanna please people. I wanna look, oh, 'Oh wow, Bernie did really well. I should do Bernie more often.' You know, like shit like that.
Yeah, I don't buy that you don't care. Like, I think everybody cares. You can say it, and I get what you mean. Like, you know, that should be the attitude going into it, but it is unavoidable. Sure. I think like, well, we all give a shit how we're perceived, and we'd all be choked if, you know, I made that tweet the other day, and I got a message from a friend that said, 'Are you sure you want to tweet that?' Right? Because he'd gotten messages from people saying, Oh my God, Andrew's having a mental breakdown on Twitter right now.
He said, are you sure you wanna tweet that?
Yeah. And he said, are you sure you wanna tweet that? And I was like, oh my God, have I made this terrible mistake?
Yeah, bitch. That's why I tweeted it. Yeah, I know.
And then now, yeah, it resonated with lots of people. It got lots of traction. It got lots of nice notes about it. But, um, you know, it's, it's scary putting, putting this stuff out there.
Yeah. I, I, I don't find that stuff to be scary, but that's weird. I, I, when someone says, I hate, I would hate that interaction. Are you sure you wanna tweet that? Yeah, dude. I just like, it took me like an hour to write that. I'm fucking sure.
It's a double down for Sam. It's like, you know what? Like I'm, I'm gonna double down on that now.
Yeah. I want a friend to text me that if they actually think that though. Like I think that's a valuable service, right?
Eh, no, I don't. But, uh, that's okay. Different friends. I, I, I, I like also if I have a friend, my friend Jack, sometimes I'll tweet stuff, and he'll like reply like, that's not true, or like, what are you— like, he'll like argue with me. And I'll tweet— I'll text him, I go, Jack, don't argue with me in public. Like, don't you dare. Like, one time he like—
brothers do that sometimes, drives me crazy.
Oh dude, I'm like, we're family, this stays in the family. Don't you— don't you fucking— you defend me, you, you lay down in traffic for me as I will for you. You don't talk— you don't argue with me in public. He always fucking does that. Like, what if I tweeted out the numbers of the podcast and he was like, um, but like megaphone is wrong, or he said something like, uh, he's like, oh, but you count YouTube, that kind of like, uh, that's not really a download, or he said something like that. I don't even remember what it was. And I'm like, well, what the fuck, Jack? Just like shut up. I'm like, just text me, but we're not going to argue in public. You're supposed to— I don't even know how we got on that. But anyway, my point was not bringing up that we shouldn't do this stuff. I'm just curious is to hear what, what the feedback is. We care about feedback. I care about, I'll speak for myself. I care about feedback.
Tweet at us and, uh, you can test me and see if I respond to any of it and fail my, uh, I think, fail my test.
So how, how, how often are you keeping this? How often are you holding your phone? How often do you use your phone?
Oh, well, I'm, I'm basically, I'm down from 6 hours a day of screen time to 2, just over 2 hours. And I'm basically just on random days. I've just been taking my Apple Watch. So if I have a Zoom call or something, I'll take my phone, but if I don't, I'll just bring my Apple Watch and it's been strangely freeing, right? Because you look, I can still see the text and I can get the calls.
Yeah. Apple Watch to AirPod. And if I'm texting, I've gotta do this stupid scratch or Siri. And so it's just not fun to text. And so I just don't do it.
Andrew, one other thing. You met Steve Jobs?
Yeah, I met Steve Jobs.
Tell me what that was. What, what happened?
Well, so a lot of people don't know this, but when I was 15, my very first business was a website with an incredibly embarrassing nerdy name. It was called MacTeens.com. It was me and a kid from Hawaii and another Canadian kid. We all made this tech news website. We started writing reviews and news and all that kind of stuff. We started getting a lot of traffic and breaking Apple rumors and stuff. And I ended up getting invited to go to Macworld as a member of the press. And I got invited to this tour of the Apple Store in New York when that was brand new. It was the first one, I think. And so, I walk into this tour and I think we're just going to get some PR flack touring us around. And I'm standing outside waiting and a limousine rolls up and it's Steve Jobs. And he gets out and he shakes my hand.. And I'm 15, the guy is my hero, I've read every single biography of him, I'm like a quivering mess. And I spent the next hour, me and like 5 other journalists, getting toured around the Apple Store with Steve Jobs. And I just asked him a bunch of questions about the products they were releasing. It was like a PR thing, so it's not like I got to ask him deep questions, but it was pretty freaking cool on the bucket list.
What was his presence like? How did he treat people? What did you take away from from just being around him.
Well, I mean, you got to remember, he was in Steve Jobs PR, Macworld CEO mode. So, he was just incredibly polished. I remember he was talking about the CD burner in the 17-inch iMac and I was like enraptured. It's a fucking OEM CD burner, right? But he's making it sound like it's the greatest thing in the world. I mean, the reality distortion field is obviously real. Um, and yeah, he's just an amazing, amazing guy. And it was, it was cool to meet him.
Did you read this story that this guy tweeted out yesterday? I thought you might have a story, uh, related to this, this guy. His tweet kind of went viral about he was trying to sell his company to Steve Jobs and he fucked up. Did you read this? No. Like I said, it's the guy who was the CEO of iLike, which was like a kind of like a music discovery service, kind of like in the early, uh, you know, like startup days. And, um, it was like a popular service. And, um, it's like Apple wanted to— Apple was interested in acquiring them. And he's like, perfect. Like Apple would be my dream place to get acquired. And they go and he gets to have a meeting with Steve Jobs. And he sits in the meeting with Steve Jobs. And he's like, you know, I started off a little rough cuz I was so nervous to be in front of Steve Jobs. He's like, but we kind of hit our groove in the presentation. We hit our demo. Like, you know, like first he's like the demo kind of went off the rails first because the executive suite Wi-Fi was down. And I was like, oh shit, how are we? We're not on the internet. How do we do our demo? Well, we like recovered and Steve asked a few questions while we were talking, but we had great product answers and you could just tell he was digging it. And, um, so his story is basically that at the end of the meeting, he was like, look, like, I think you guys are great. Um, and I think you built something, something good here. Uh, you know, we'd like to buy your company. I'm gonna, um, you know, like, like I'd like to buy your company. We're, I'll talk to Eddie and we'll figure out, you know, Eddie will take it from here. He'll, he'll, deal with the details. And, uh, and then he's like, the guy like kind of didn't want the meeting to end right there. He's like, you know, first he's like, that's amazing. But then he's like, you know, like what, uh, what range, you know, would you be thinking about for, for price for, for an acquisition? And then like Steve kind of like the dial, the dial like turns up a little bit. He's like, this conversation gets a little more serious. We're talking about the price now. And he's like, um, he's like, what's your revenue and how much did you raise? Uh, what was the valuation at your last financing? And the guy's like, ah, like, you know, revenue, uh, like we haven't, we're pre-revenue, we're super small right now, but you know, we raised at a $50 million valuation and we've added like, like millions of users since then. Um, I think he said 50 million users since then, which is some absurd number. And, uh, and Steve Jobs is like, uh, we'd probably acquire it for $50 million. And then the guy's like, went from this high of like Steve Jobs just said he wants to buy my company to like, Oh shit, we've been working like since the last round we raised 2 years ago, we've been working, acquired all these users. I'd have to go to my team and be like, hey, you've created essentially no value between last valuation and, and the exit here. So he's like, you know, doesn't want it to just leave it there. And he's like, he's like, you know, I just think, I don't think my team will be, I don't, I don't think my team or the investors would, you know, that would be acceptable to them.. And then he's like, he's like, we'll make it. He's like, well, like, we'll convince them. Like, that was like Steve Jobs' response, something like that. And the guy's like, you know, I just feel like, you know, I think we're worth more than that. I think we're, I think we're worth $150 million. And he like paused for a second. He goes, actually, like, I know we're worth, I know we're worth $150 million. And he's like, Jobs got like pissed. He's like, you know, Do you have another offer on the table? Have you been offered $150 million? Is that how you know that you're worth that? And then the guy's like, just pause for a second. He's like, he's like, bullshit. He's like, you're a liar. And he's like, I don't, he's like, forget this. We're not doing this deal. And basically like walked out. And then he's like, we tried to salvage the deal. Like we tried to like with Eddie, Eddie tried to like make it all good. He's like, Steve Jobs called him later. It was like, I don't trust you. You, I don't trust you. I think you're a liar. You overstated. Like, You know, every— you overplayed your hand basically. And I was like, we're not doing this.
Oh, I love that. That is awesome. Who wrote that?
Oh wow.
What company? That is an awesome story.
This guy, uh, let me pull up his name. So his name's Ali, uh, Partovi. So his, his Twitter handle is A-P-A-R-T-O-V-I. So A-P-A-R-T-O-V-I.
What, what ended up happening to his company? Did, did it sell?
So I think, uh, let's see what, what ended up happening.
So it's what a baller story.
I think that's a great, he's like, soon after that, Apple released the iTunes Genius Sidebar. It was a ripoff of their thing. Facebook copied their thing and they sold the company for a loss within a year. Um, that was the sort of like the, oh my God.
To the story. The other good one is Drew, the story of Drew Houston going into, they were talking about selling Dropbox, Apple and Steve Jobs just starts saying feature, not a product. You're a feature, not a product. We can just rip you off.. And I mean, in some ways Steve Jobs is right. I think that criticism is fair over the next decade.
Couldn't rip him off though.
Could be irrelevant. But at the same time, Drew Houston went on to become a billionaire and build this great public company.
So dude, I actually, I love stories where Steve Jobs is wrong because the guy seems like a fucking asshole. Like, you know, he fuck that guy. Was he brilliant? Yeah. But like I was thinking the other day. Um, where he like had this quote where he goes to that guy who, uh, who was selling Pepsi and he was like, do you just want to sell sugar or water your whole life? Or do you want to come and change the world? And I'm like, part of me is like, badass, that's awesome, Steve, good job. Yeah, soda sucks. Whatever you're doing doesn't suck. And then I'm like, dog, what you've just created is fucking candy bars for the brain. You know, if we hate If I'm supposed to hate Zuckerberg, I should dislike you too. Like, you're selling the crack pipe, he's selling the crack. What's the difference? And so, you know what I mean? Like, it's like, it's the same. It's like, it's the same thing. Like, so anyway, whenever I hear these stories about him and being arrogant, I'm like, yeah, you're badass. You're awesome. You're always right. And then also like, eh, you're a dick. Shut the fuck up.
Like, I was, I was as a CEO, I was terrible because I couldn't do that. Right? Like, imagine, Sam, you're hiring someone and you say like, do you want to change the face of publishing forever? Right? You just sound like such a douche. But you talk to most Silicon Valley CEOs and they say something like that. I just could never bring myself to say that.
Well, part of me is envious. I'm like, oh wow, you actually believe that you are doing something. And then part of me is like, um, um, nah, you're full of it. I just read this book called Endurance. Have you guys heard of this book called Endurance?
Oh my God.
It's amazing. It's—
I never want to feel like your life is good.
Read that. Oh my God. I couldn't put it down. Sean, you know what it is?
I haven't read it, but I've seen the— I've seen the COVID I know the COVID in my brain.
So basically, in the early 1900s, probably between 1900 and like 1925, it was called like the heroic era of Arctic expedition. So they had steam engines and they had combustible engines, but it was still— they still had sails and they didn't have radios. And so these guys would sail from England all the way down to Antarctica, the very southern part part of the world to try and figure things out. The world wasn't really well mapped out, but it kind of was. So basically it was kind of safe, but mostly not safe. And this guy named Ernest Shackleton basically led this expedition of 30 people and they got stuck in Antarctica. And it's basically the story about their 2.5-year or maybe 2-year expedition to survive. And what I learned reading that book is basically the pack, the people you're leading, they mimic the behavior of the leader. And so for a while I was against this, like, we're gonna change the world. Or like, you know, I should be vulnerable and I should let people know, like, you know, things aren't going that good. But now after reading that book, I'm like, ah, no, fuck it. You gotta like convince everyone that it's gonna be okay no matter what.
Totally. It's an amazing book too. I, um, when I get stressed out at work, one of the things I love to do is to watch, um, uh, what is it called? Alone. Have you guys seen that show? They literally dump people in the middle of nowhere. And it's a competition to see who can survive in the wilderness all by themselves for the longest.
Oh my God.
And you're watching people eating rats and trying to catch fish in the freezing cold.
How long do they last?
Someone cuts his leg open with a hatchet or whatever. Usually it's like some people go like 3 months, 4 months, 6 months, but a lot of people are out pretty quick. And the Shackleton book is exactly like that. I watch it and I just feel so relaxed because I'll be cozy on the couch and warm in my bed reading the book. And it really makes you appreciate, uh, just how comfortable our lives are.
You should read that book, Sean, so we could talk about it because it, like, I read it over, uh, 2 days. I think it, it, it, it was, it's riveting. I posted really, it was crazy. I can't believe that, that, that people survived that. And it made me feel thankful. And it showed me that like, in order to be a leader, you do need to convince people and yourself that everything's going to be okay. When I read that, I was like, I don't want to be a good leader. I'm not willing to do what this guy was willing to do.
Am I willing to go this far? Totally. Something funny just happened on Twitter. So, speaking of distractions and all that good stuff, and speaking of the memetic kind of like, who are your models? And then who do you want to see? Who do you not like to see win? All right. So, so Bezos, Jeff Bezos just tweeted out this thing. He goes, he goes, you know, you should listen and be open, but don't let anybody tell you who you are. This is just one of the many. This was, and he posted a photo of a Baron's article of a headline of a, a front page of Baron's, which says Amazon Bomb. And it's a picture of Jeff Bezos's face on a bomb. And it says that the, the title is the idea that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has pioneered a new business is silly. He's just another middleman and the stock market is starting to catch on. The real winners.
And this was in like the early 2000s.
Yeah. This is in, um, I don't know when, like, sorry, go ahead. 99-ish or something like that. Oh yeah. This is 1999. He goes, uh, it says, The real winners on the net, and it's like apostrophe net, like internet. The real winners on the net will be firms that sell their own products directly to consumers. Just look what happened to Sony and Dell. That's what's going to happen to Amazon. And, and so Bezos was basically saying, like, you know, people told us we were going to— there's one of many things where people told us we were going to fail. And he goes, today Amazon is one of the most successful companies and has revolutionized two entirely different industries. And then Elon Musk tweeted out and replied, With just a silver, a silver medal with the number 2 on it, like the emoji with the second place medal.
Oh, give, you gotta give the, because Elon's currently richer than Bezos either because of that or space.
SpaceX doing better than Bezos.
No, I say, I think, I think it's the rich thing, which is douchey. If it's a space thing, that's not douchey. If it's a rich thing, that's douchey.
But it's so funny.
Cause you were saying, well, it's memetic, right? Those guys are in a rival.
Yeah. You were saying like, to us, Jeff Bezos is not really the rival. We don't really root for his, you know, whatever. Uh, it doesn't like hurt us personally when Jeff Bezos wins a little bit more, but, but for these guys, these are their memetic rivals, right? Like these are their, their peers, uh, that they sort of are, are in competition with.
Dude, also, this is, I do wanna see Elon lose a little bit cuz he gets too smug with his, how great he is. He's smug. Cuz he is in fact amazing. But how baller is that tweet?
Hilarious. It has way more likes than the first one.
You said earlier, you said You said, "Fuck Steve Jobs," and I think in order to be that successful, you have to have some kind of personality disorder or trauma or something. And you look at Musk or Bezos or if you read more about Bezos, I think he's a really difficult person to work for. All these guys are so complicated. And 100 years ago, you just wouldn't know. There wasn't Twitter. You just wouldn't see this. This would all go on behind the scenes.
And it's crazy that we get to see stuff like Well, I don't even think it's that complicated. Musk is really successful because he's incredibly smart and has a complex because his father probably didn't love him. Like, it's probably quite simple, but it works, right? I'm thankful that—
Well, Sam, you say this thing that's great. I think— I don't know where you got it from, but, you know, show me a great man and I'll show you a bad man or something. What is that quote?
Well, I always say— I don't know if I got it from anywhere or not, but all men are also evil men.
All great men are something like that, right?
Yeah. Great men are bad men. Yes. And in order to, in order to be great, you have to do bad stuff or you may not think it's bad, but like, let's say that like, uh, 60% of Americans think Obama is a saint. Well, like the people who he droned, they don't think he's a saint. I've got Afghani friends and they'll be like, oh, I fucking hate Obama. You know, he, he droned my family. And so, but like, so in order to like do great shit and be loved by, uh, at a large scale, you're going to piss off a lot of people.
The way I would put it, it would be better, might be all the great men are sad men, right? So, they have a sadness or a trauma—
Don't one-up me, Andrew. Don't one-up me.
Or a disorder that's driving them to do this because why else would anyone do it, right? Talking about the Shackleton expedition, these guys are the Shackleton expedition of business. Why would anyone choose to do that unless they have a personality disorder or deep trauma?
Right. But, memetic rivalry. Andrew just one-upped you. Perfect. Yeah. Actually, I think your example of Obama drone striking people is a little too extreme. More like, uh, Elon Musk is a, is a great inventor and businessman. Uh, that doesn't also mean he's got great views on the vaccine and, uh, on, he's not a great husband maybe. And like, yeah, you know, we will praise somebody for an aspect, like on this podcast, I will happily praise somebody for an aspect of something they do that's interesting. Like, this is like the, the Jake Paul tweet I did where I was like, Jake Paul is a great marketer, a great self-promoter. Like, I don't even think that's arguable. Like, I think he's clearly a great self-promoter. That is, how he is so famous as he promoted himself into fame. And like, people are like, yeah, but he, you know, he's accused of assault on this girl and like, he's a jerk. And like, haven't you seen these videos where he makes these crude jokes? I said, oh, like, sorry, did I say he's my, like, he's my hero and that like, he is a great boyfriend? Like, I don't think I said that. I think I said he's a great marketer and self-promoter and you can learn from that and appreciate that. And that's the, the way I take it, which is, um, you know, anybody that, that you praise or you call out for being awesome or call out for being bad, it's not, you're not saying they are either all great or all bad. It's like they are great in ways and bad in ways. And everybody is that. And it's not even that interesting to say at that point.
You can like how he builds cars, but not how he treats his marriage.
Right.
Yeah.